This history of University of Wisconsin baseball combines colorful stories from the archives, interviews with former players and coaches, a wealth of historic photographs, and the statistics beloved by fans of the game.

Ty Cobb, Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson, Jim Thorpe, Jesse Owens, Curly Lambeau, and singer Cab Calloway--these and many more famous athletes and entertainers crossed the same, legendary home plate--at Milwaukee's Borchert Field, a major sports venue for 64 years. Here, baseball historian Bob Buege reintroduces sports fans to this rickety wooden stadium where, for generations, sports was made, along with a few rodeos, thrill shows, presidential visits, and even multiple eruptions of Mount Vesuvius!

Highlights the histories, backgrounds and greatest moments of the college sports careers of players and coaches in football, basketball and hockey from the Big Ten school the University of Wisconsin. Original.

These unique and easy-to-read vignettes about Badger lore include the football exploits of Pat O'Dea and Alan "The Horse" Ameche; the basketball heroics of Wisconsin's 1941 national championship team; and the thrills generated by Badger greats Suzy Favor, Pat Richter, Michael Finley, Mark Johnson, Scott Lamphear, and many more. Includes a complete listing of Wisconsin s nearly 10,000 letter winners and a detailed history of coaches and administrators behind the scenes.

Scouting has been called pro baseball’s personalized way of renewing itself from year to year and a pathway to the game’s past. It takes a very special person to be a baseball scout: normal family life is out of the question because travel is a constant companion. Yet for those with the genuine calling for it, there could be no other life. Hearing the special thwack off the bat that indicates a raw prospect may be the real deal is the dream that keeps true scouts going. Scouts have the difficult task of not only discovering and signing new players but envisioning the trajectory of raw talent into the future. But the place of the traditional scout has become increasingly dire. In 2016 Major League Baseball eliminated the MLB Scouting Bureau that had been created in the 1970s to augment the regular scouting staffs of individual teams. On the eve of the 2017 playoffs that saw the Houston Astros crowned as World Series champions, the team dismissed ten professional scouts and by 2019 halved the number of all their scouts to less than twenty. More and more teams are replacing their experienced talent hunters with people versed in digital video and analytics but who have limited field knowledge of the game, driven by the Moneyball-inspired trend to favor analytics, data, and algorithms over instinct and observation. In Baseball’s Endangered Species Lee Lowenfish explores in-depth how scouting has been affected by the surging use of metrics along with other changes in modern baseball business history: expansion of the Major Leagues in 1961 and 1962, the introduction of the amateur free agent draft in 1965, and the coming of Major League free agency after the 1976 season. With an approach that is part historical, biographical, and oral history, Baseball’s Endangered Species is a comprehensive look at the scouting profession and the tradition of hands-on evaluation. At a time when baseball is drenched with statistics, many of them redundant or of questionable value, Lowenfish explores through the eyes and ears of scouts the vital question of “makeup”: how a player copes with failure, baseball’s essential, painful truth.

Madison made history in the sixties. Landmark civil rights laws were passed. Pivotal campus protests were waged. A spring block party turned into a three-night riot. Factor in urban renewal troubles, a bitter battle over efforts to build Frank Lloyd Wright’s Monona Terrace, and the expanding influence of the University of Wisconsin, and the decade assumes legendary status. In this first-ever comprehensive narrative of these issues—plus accounts of everything from politics to public schools, construction to crime, and more—Madison historian Stuart D. Levitan chronicles the birth of modern Madison with style and well-researched substance. This heavily illustrated book also features annotated photographs that document the dramatic changes occurring downtown, on campus, and to the Greenbush neighborhood throughout the decade. Madison in the Sixties is an absorbing account of ten years that changed the city forever.